Shortly before the 2012 presidential election, a senior figure in the British intelligence community was asked who he wanted to win. He said he was praying for Obama: if Mitt Romney won and simply continued Obama’s drone strikes, there would be tens of thousands demonstrating in London and questions asked in Parliament about how exactly the UK was assisting.

The area of land required to produce a given quantity of food is now just a third of what it was in 1960, thanks to technology.

It is estimated that we will need less land — by an area bigger than India — to feed the nine billion people of 2050 than we need to feed seven billion today.

In Japan, a single robot-operated shed harvests more lettuces a day (30,000), grown under LED lights without pesticides and with minimal use of water and power, than a lettuce farm of 300 acres normally produces.

Less than 2.5 per cent of England and just 1 per cent of Britain is built on

Productivity is one of Britain’s problems, but in the vital energy sector policies are making things worse not better by forcing in technologies such as wind and solar that are of low productivity and whose intermittency harms the overall productivity of the electricity sector. That is dangerous. If we learn anything from the Industrial Revolution it is that improvements in energy sector productivity are the elixir of growth, while a massively over-capitalised system of low productivity, like the one we are now building, will lead to national poverty.

To put it mildly, Mr Trump’s billionaire plutocrats are unlikely to lack self-confidence, though by their age, it should be tempered by experience. When these characters speak, they expect to be heard and take it for granted that they will be worth hearing. If the new President wants an echo-chamber, he has chosen the wrong people.

Bruce Anderson’s take on explaining Trump is one of the most succinct I have come across.

Since President Nixon, the liberals having been struggling to retain their reputation for patriotism and their appeal to the middle ground. Because of Watergate, Nixon made a false start. Reagan quickly picked up the baton. Roosevelt Democrats became Reagan Democrats. Today, Liberalism has almost become a dirty word, its patriotism constantly impugned, appealing only to elites and minorities, with nothing to say to the flag-saluting ordinary joe who wants the sort of job that his father would have taken for granted.

The average American worker and his wife are worried: they would like their kids to go to college to quip themselves for the new jobs, but where is the money to come from? To cheer them up, the TV news is full of stories about rich kids at Harvard or Yale – or Carnegie-Mellon – demanding lavatory ‘rights’ for transgender students. It is easy to see why people like the Hard-hats feel nothing in common with contemporary American liberalism. It is also easy to understand why they hate Hillary Clinton.

If leaving the EU is, as Sturgeon says, an act of extraordinary economic self-harm, then leaving the UK must be like protesting the loss of a hand by cutting off your other arm and, just for good measure, a leg too. Scotland sells four times as much to the rest of the UK as it does to the EU.

A 2007 book from the Gallup press, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, based on a poll of over 50,000 Muslims in 10 countries, found that 7 percent of Muslims deem the 9/11 attacks “completely justified,” 13.5 percent consider the attacks completely or “largely justified,” and 36.6 percent consider the attacks completely, largely, or “somewhat justified.

Ever since the EU referendum, the myth of a divided country has been sustained by a self-appointed elite that has been unable to accept that ordinary working people decided to defy them and to vote to leave the EU.

Both sides held not opposing interests but opposing views in the same manner as any collective of individuals faced with a major decision as to its future. In any collective, a division of opinion on major issues invariably occurs, be it in a family on whether the Christmas bonus should be spent on a holiday abroad or saved for the kids’ university education; in a trade union whether to take strike action to secure a wage increase; or for that matter in society at large on who to vote for in a general election.

The opposing sides may have different opinions, but they have the same common interest: the family, the trade union members and the country respectively.

Trump’s ascent to the presidency involved beating not only all of his Republican rivals, but upending the assumptions of the entire political establishment — columnists and consultants, funders and favour-mongers — so he is beholden to none of the traditional Washington power centres. That, alongside a Republican majority in House and Senate, gives him almost unprecedented freedom of manoeuvre.

As is Tweeted by Democrats on an almost hourly basis, Donald Trump lost the popular vote to Mrs Clinton by three million or so votes. What isn’t Tweeted so much by the Left is that Congressional Republicans beat Congressional Democrats in the national popular vote by about two million.

Although the electoral landscapes are different and comparisons of the presidential and congressional tallies is somewhat simplistic, we are looking at a five million vote gap between what Trump achieved and what more conventional Republicans achieved. Furthermore, with one or two exceptions, nearly all Republican Senate candidates got bigger wins in key states than Trump.

David Cameron’s approach was to take Britain’s existing arrangements with the European Union as a baseline, and then seek to adjust them: to start close, and try to get some distance. Theresa May’s is to start with the kind of relationship she wants to get to, and work backwards from there: to take complete separation as the baseline, and rebuild what connections we can where we can.

Obama administration officials have seemed to eschew the word “ally”, preferring the term “partners” instead. An ally is a country who sends sons and daughters to die on your battlefields. A partner is someone you do deals with. There’s a big difference.

When the history of this decade comes to be written, we may conclude that in voting to leave the European Union as it drifts towards the economic and political rocks, Britain has averted rather than experienced a populist revolution and the election of a demagogue. We have prevented the installation of a British Trump, or — for that matter — Farage.

The increasing confusion about what hate crime means, who it refers to and what it covers is having its own divisive effect. Inflated hate crime figures are reinforcing division by painting a picture of a Britain more bigoted and hate-filled than it actually is.

It has also created a two-tier justice system, because when it comes to victims, some have special status. Consider this extraordinary passage from the website of the Crown Prosecution Service: “All police forces would want you to report crimes . . . But, if it could be a hate crime, the police will take it even more seriously.” The College of Policing’s guidance goes further, asserting that because “hate crimes can have a greater emotional impact on the victims than comparable non-hate crimes . . . all victims should not be treated the same”. Got that, you white and straight and faithless, you “cisgendered” and able-bodied? If you get beaten up, your bruises and your bleeding are less important in the eyes of the law, less worthy of strong punishment.

Jeremy Corbyn is not as straightforward as his supporters claim. He has, most notably, been disingenuous about his real views on Brexit. But then Trump used to be a Democrat. Authenticity is not the same as policy consistency.

When Corbyn promises to “break the grip of vested interests” he’s saying what Labour leaders have always said. The trouble is that it’s not very different from what Theresa May is saying, and she says it a bit better than he does.

The key dividing line in the USA remains racial, not economic. But there are real reasons for the sharp growth of white resentment. Already, whites are in a minority in America’s schools. In 17 states there are more whites dying than are being born. Nationally, the white share of the electorate is predicted to fall from 69% this year to 46% in 2060. On the other hand, the Hispanic share of America’s population is predicted to rise to 27% from 13%; and the share that is Asian or “other” is expected to double to 14% from 7%. By the time a baby born this year can vote, whites will be on the verge of becoming another ethnic minority, albeit the largest

After he became President in 1969, during his very first post-election session with Henry Kissinger, who would become his national security advisor, Nixon rebuked the Agency as a group of “Ivy League liberals” who lacked analytic integrity and had always opposed him politically. Like Trump, Nixon did not see the value of CIA intelligence briefings. It is unclear whether Nixon read any of the President’s Daily Briefs, the CIA’s flagship top-secret product tailored for each President.

The news media are far less respected today than they were in forty years ago.

In 1972, Gallup first asked the question: “In general, how much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media . . . when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly — a great deal, a fair amount, not very much, or none at all?”

Trump won by a huge margin among whites — 63% to 31% among white men, 53% to 43% among white women. His appalling sexism made little difference: he led 62% to 34% among non-graduate white women. Even among the quarter of white men who hold a degree, he led by 14 points. By contrast, he lost in every category of black, Hispanic and Asian voter.

One of the striking aspects emerging about the hacking scandal is that British intelligence was apparently first to tip off US intelligence that Russian hackers were targeting Democrat computer servers. It is reported that the same Russian cyber group that allegedly interfered in the US election, “Fancy Bears,” previously attempted to disrupt the UK General Election in 2015, but its attacks were foiled by Britain’s signals intelligence agency, GCHQ.

The big reason that Corbyn cannot copy Trump is that he hasn’t learned the lesson of how Trump won. It wasn’t simply by railing against the “rigged system”. Trump won by taking a coalition of the Republican base – minus the elite parts of it such as the Bush family – and bolting on to it two constituencies that Mitt Romney had failed to mobilise four years before. Trump won over enough working-class Democrats and non-voters to get him over the line in the Rust Belt swing states that mattered.

Corbyn isn’t even holding on to Labour’s core vote, let alone winning over parts of the electorate that the party failed to win in 2015.

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About The view from opposite Harrods

I took over as Chair of British Rowing in April 2018, and having written this blog for some time first when I was at Betfair (2000-2010) and then just about things that interested (or nearly killed!) me, I thought I would return to it to record some of my thoughts on the sport. If you’re interested […]more →